🚀 go-pugleaf

Aha, the Mac vs DOS religious wars are being ignited again.

Many good points were made, which I'll not repeat in full.

(1) Learning curve. Both MAC, Windows and OS/2 have a shorter learning
curve for applications software.

(2) Software available. Much software, especially that designed
specifically for education, is junk, whatever platform it is written for.

(3) Systems with a short learning curve generally use windows, menus,
icons and prompts. (for WIMPs). However, when one gets over the learning
curve, such systems get in the way of productivity. Why should I have to
endure a test of eye-hand coordination through several drop down menus, to
issue a simple command? I've seen folks with UNIX systems (yes, they are
available for IBMs and clones for very low cost) go through operations
with command-line entries ten times as fast as a person could do the same
thing with a 'friendly' system.

(4) Why is it that students, and faculty, will spend money from their
budgets for software to do a task which they could do with a program they
could write themselves is BASIC, Fortran, Pascal, C. or whatever, in less
than an hour? With the user-written program, they can tailor it to their
own needs. Try that with the commercial stuff.

(5) We seem not to be achieving computer literacy, but training students
to be software users. Someone mentioned 'cricket graph'. It is, in my
estimation, a piece of junk, at least for serious data analysis and graph
making. I'd rather have students do the process by hand on graph paper,
they'd learn more.

        -- Donald